Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is a Latinx
professor at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Canada
Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change. She began
her career as a teacher in Brazil in 1994 and has since led
educational and research programs in countries including the UK,
Finland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Brazil, and Canada.
Andreotti works across sectors in international and comparative
education, particularly focusing on global justice and citizenship,
Indigenous and community engagement, sustainability, and social and
ecological responsibility. Her research examines relationships
between historical, systemic, and on-going forms of violence, and
the inherent unsustainability of modernity. Andreotti is one of the
founding members of Gesturing Decolonial Futures Collective
(decolonialfutures.net) and Teia das 5 Curas, an international
network of Indigenous communities mostly in Canada and Latin
America. She currently collaborates with with these groups to
direct research projects and learning initiatives related to global
healing and wellbeing in times of unprecedented challenges.
“Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us
as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern
power. Clear, creative, and cogent, the work offers cutting-edge
philosophy at the same time that it furnishes usable guidance for
how to cope with the coming perils of colonialism and capitalism.
It’s a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at
right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical
dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under
conditions of complexity.”
—Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and
Sustainability at the University of Michigan
“Asking the question ‘What if racism, colonialism, and all other
forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social
diseases?’, Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and
educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking.
Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such
as those inspired by Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has
created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering
from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as
humans experience it subjectively.”
—Denise Ferreira da Silva, PhD, professor at the University of
British Columbia Social Justice Institute and author of Toward a
Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt
“This book is rude. Like the shaman’s confident cackle. Like the
punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a
trickster’s feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly
passed. And right there—my fellow modern citizen—right there, in
the author’s cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her
generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of
white modernity. Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in
defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our
persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to
something else. It is time to gather. We can start here,
together.”
—Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
“This is not an ordinary book and it may not be for everyone: it is
a thought experiment that skillfully and creatively creates
conditions for us to shed our arrogance and to get our proverbial
shit together. The author puts it beautifully but bluntly: she
lovingly does not care about ‘what’ you think: your delusions of
ends and means and your sense of self-importance are part of the
problem. The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity
for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity
and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist
differently and, put frankly, to grow up. It does not matter if you
agree or not with the premise that modernity is dying and in need
of ‘hospicing.’ If you take it hypothetically, and engage with the
exercises, you will be a more decent human being as a result of
reading this book. If what the author is saying resonates, if you
are ready to do this difficult work, get over yourself and read it,
for the sake of the people around you, and of the planet.”
—Dan McCarthy, PhD, director of the University of Waterloo
Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR)
“This is not a book to be picked up lightly. Vanessa Machado de
Oliveira is carrying stories that will do things with you. Her book
will change you, if you let it. There’s strong medicine here, badly
needed. There are clues to how we find the paths that lead to the
unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know
it.”
—Dougald Hine, cofounder of the Dark Mountain Project and A School
Called HOME
“This is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious
kind, but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety.
Important and powerful, Hospicing Modernity diligently tracks a
complex word—modernity—through the bewildering forest of our times.
. . . Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s a real storyteller, and that’s
a praise word where I come from. Hospicing Modernity is a troubling
gift in a big cultural moment, and I’m delighted to have
encountered it. It seems alive, crawling around my desk, hooting at
the moon.”
—Martin Shaw, PhD, author of Courting the Wild Twin
“This is an outstanding book—truly original and profoundly
perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its
pedagogic approach. It examines a range of urgent philosophical
issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in
which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally
and culturally productive futures. It is a book that is not only
thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile
discussions.”
—Fazal Rizvi, PhD, emeritus professor at the University of
Melbourne and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“In a suite of stories, informed in part by Indigenous thinking,
Machado de Oliveira ruptures certainty with the void that many
Indigenous peoples have recognized for millennia, pushing the
reader over the edge into mocking darkness. The reader (and the
world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in
tentatively plaiting the gloom we’re in, to make sense of our
predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the
brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty? Machado
de Oliveira has established that we need to do the former and, with
the telling of fragility, she promotes a new strength through
mystery. Beware, though: this is not a book for the fainthearted.
Be prepared to be confronted by the world—don’t expect to have it
nicely served up. The work she calls for is difficult, but
ultimately it is the world that is at stake.”
—Carl Mika, PhD, director of the Centre for Global Studies at the
University of Waikato and author of Indigenous Education and the
Metaphysics of Presence
“For Indigenous communities, the teachings that are necessary for
engagement with sacred plants are very rigorous and require a lot
of discipline. Informed by these teachings, this book is a call for
responsibility and for collective healing, as we face the demise of
the house of modernity, a house built upon delusions of separation
and superiority. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that
can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the
harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet.”
—Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Federation of the Huni Kui
Indigenous People of Acre
“Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of
fieldwork that connects the very sense of who ‘we’ are with global
legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought. It is
a book of acute vision and insight, and taps into that most
underused faculty we so desperately need to attend to ‘the end of
the world as we know it’: the imagination. Through a series of
thought experiments, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira compels us to
truly face the enormity of planetary crises as well as the
seemingly benign ways we are complicit in them. Written in a tone
that directly addresses the reader through stories, metaphors, and
rich imagery, this book resonates with the vitality of life itself,
taking us on a transformative educational journey that inspires us
to take seriously our profound interconnection to all others—past,
present, and future—with whom we share this world.”
—Sharon Todd, professor of education at Maynooth University,
Ireland
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